Last night’s New York Tech Meetup was prologued by an impromptu appearance from well-known New York Senator Chuck Schumer. While his words were nice, he said nothing particularly new or enthralling. “My job,” he began, “is to keep tech growing in New York.”

Growth in tech is good for the city, as well the hope for immigration reform, he added. At the same time, Schumer queried, “Why shouldn’t we have have wifi everywhere in New York?” He then called on the New York developer community to “come up with ways to do that.”

And so he left the stage, thankful for New York’s thriving tech scene, and let some young burgeoning techies demo their upcoming shenanigans.

Almost as if this was planned, a company called WiredNYC showcased its New York tech-centric project shortly thereafter. Wired is an initiative to make Internet connectivity in New York buildings more transparent. It has devised a set of standards that can be easily tested in each building, to indicate how good an internet connection in a certain building is. Each building tested is given a score, which ranks on a scale from “Connected” (the worst) to “Platinum” (the best).

The idea behind the Wired Score is to allow businesses looking for office space to know what they’re getting into before signing the lease and calling Comcast. WiredNYC’s Arie Barendrecht says he hopes this will cause landlords to “wake up… and hopefully invest [in better infrastructure].”

The initiative was created through one of Bloomberg’s many tech outreach tentacles. It officially launched last September, and has already scored 278 Class A buildings in New York. The plan is to continue scoring buildings in a timely fashion and launch a simultaneous residential program in the near future.

While WiredNYC admits that landlords probably wouldn’t be too thrilled to admit their building has shoddy Internet connectivity, the hope is that this could become a new standard for brokers and realtors when showing buildings and apartments.

This is all very early on, and before any of this can be fully implemented, WiredNYC will need to rate every Class A building. Following that, the scoring must go on to other, less pristine New York structures, so its standards become more ubiquitous. Additionally, it will need to pray that the transition from a Bloomberg to a de Blasio administration will yield an environment equally amenable to these kinds of tech initiatives.

Schumer remains optimistic in this vein explaining that “de Blasio is interested in expanding Bloomberg’s work on tech.”

And if we reach a day when all apartments are scored, here’s hoping my future building will deemed platinum.

“For all the clumsy rhetorical lip service [former Yahoo News head] Guy Vidra pays to The New Republic’s hallowed intellectual traditions, this is what his vision of a nimble digital news product finally translates into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategically designed to conceal a rancid interior of ‘elevated’ advertising.”

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart is said to be raising $600 million in its latest bid to compete with Amazon. The company is also said to have garnered a higher valuation with this funding round — quite the feat, considering it was previously valued at around $11.5 billion. [Source: The Economic Times]

Here comes another unicorn: Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing company, has raised $46 million at a $1.17 billion valuation. The funds will be used to help the 700-person company expand its marketing platform. [Source: Fortune]

Curator, the tool Twitter created so the media could find and share tweets with its audience, is now available to the public. Because if there’s anything people wanted to see more of, it’s tweets randomly inserted into blog posts, television spots, and other forms of media. [Source: TechCrunch]

A court in France has decided not to ban Uber’s low-cost services until the country’s highest appeals court, or its supreme court, weigh in on the constitutionality of a new transport law. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Tinder is refocusing on its spam-fighting efforts in the wake of reports that movie studios are using the service to promote their movies, scammers are attempting to steal information via the app, and pranksters have created tools that trick heterosexual men into flirting with each other. [Source: The Verge]

Uber offers drivers whose accounts have been deactivated a choice: attend a class that requires them to pass an exam, or take a class that doesn’t. The latter has been informed by Uber employees, and the company has sent thousands of drivers to it, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Why is that a problem? Because Uber isn’t supposed to provide its drivers with formal training; doing so makes them bona fide employees, not independent contractors. [Source: BuzzFeed]

Flipboard users will now be able to collect articles and share them via private magazines visible only to members of certain groups. The feature is aimed at students working in the same class, companies sharing press coverage, and other groups that might want an easy way to share Web pages with each other without having to use public tools like Facebook or Twitter. [Source: Flipboard]

T-Mobile has tasked its customers with creating a real-world coverage map that makes it easier to tell where its service works and where it doesn’t. Instead of guessing at where its customers will get service — which is what other carriers do, the company claims — it’s asking people to verify its predictions so it can be more honest with consumers. [Source: T-Mobile]

Amazon isn’t happy that the Federal Aviation Administration wants to restrict how, when, and where it tests the drones it hopes will deliver packages some time in the future. So it’s opened a secret test facility in British Columbia where it can operate without pesky regulators worrying about drones falling out of the sky and hurting bystanders. [Source: The Guardian]

GitHub has been the target of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack over the last few days, perhaps because the Chinese government wants to prevent anti-censorship tools hosted on the service from spreading. The company now says that it’s able to operate despite the attacks, albeit with intermittent outages. [Source: Reuters]